Summary for those who aren’t interested in the details:
- The site should load faster
- Menu reordering is easier
- You can now copy and paste directly from Microsoft Word
Website Improvements #8: JavaScript and the Editor
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Tag Archives: Drupal
SHH! Don’t tell… LIS Training Opportunities are Alive and Well
Chances are good that you don’t know how LIS can help you learn about information technology. Why is that? Because we haven’t told you lately! Just to whet your appetite, here are few bite-size morsels to consider:
- You can sign up for free workshops here on campus. Here’s our current schedule (go/lisworkshops).
- You can request an online learning account with Element K and study at your own pace. Choose from over a thousand courses covering programs such as Excel, InDesign and Acrobat Pro as well as topics such as security awareness. Review specific topics of interest or take an entire course. Not sure where your knowledge gaps are? Take a course assessment to help you find out.
- You can ask LIS to pick up the tab for day-long, instructor-led courses offered by KnowledgeWave in South Burlington. It’s quite likely we’ll do it! Staff members taking advantage of this opportunity recently are enrolled in classes on advanced Excel, Access and new features of Office 2007/2010.
- You can round up a group of friends/colleagues and ask LIS for a training session at a time that works for you. Resources permitting we are happy to arrange workshops for groups of ten or more.
Please contact the Technology Help and Support Desk (email helpdesk@middlebury.edu or call 443-2200) to obtain more information about any of the above offerings.
Website Improvements #6: Webform
For the sixth in this weekly series of posts we started in March, I’m going to talk about our recent upgrade of the Webform module and the addition of some new modules to help you manage your forms. Here are the new things you can do with Webforms:
- Custom email templates
- Allow form submitters to save a draft
- Decide what information to download from your form results
- Set up multi-page branched forms
- Add a free-form “Other…” option to a select list
- Add custom form validation, such as “Choose up to two of these options”
The interface to interact with the Webform has also been simplified by moving most form settings into their own tabs in the Edit Console, especially the addition of the E-mails tab that gives you a quick look at who receives E-mails when the form is submitted. The interface for adding options to select list components is also easier to use with an interface to quickly add and remove options. Lastly, if you have a sidebar on the page, it is now hidden when you’re trying to edit the form components so that you can view the full form.
Website Performance: Pressflow, Varnish, Oh-My!
Executive summary:
We’ve migrated from core Drupal-6 to Pressflow, a back-port of Drupal-7 performance features. Using Pressflow allows us to cache anonymous web-requests (about 77% of our traffic) for 5-minutes and return them right from memory. While this vastly improves the amount of traffic we can handle as well as the speed of anonymous page-loads it does mean that anonymous users may not see new versions of content for at most 5 minutes. Traffic for logged-in users will always continue to flow directly through to Drupal/Pressflow and will always be up-to-the-instant-fresh.
Read on for more details about what has change and where we are at with regard to website performance.
DrupalCon 2010 Trip Report – Day 3
After attending a conference, I usually think, “Wow, we’re so far ahead here at Middlebury!” Not this time! DrupalCon was incredibly helpful in demonstrating all of the ways we can improve our site with better performance, better search, better content, and better code. I’m also really excited about the upcoming release of Drupal 7 and both confident we can move our site onto this new version and eager to use all the new features.
Here are the highlights from the last day: Continue reading
DrupalCon 2010 Trip Report – Day 2
Here is an overview and some notes from day 2 of the DrupalCon conference that Ian and I are attending in San Francisco. As Ian mentioned in yesterday’s report, day 1 of DrupalCon was mostly focused on the future of Drupal, specifically on the changes and improvements in the upcoming Drupal 7. Today’s sessions dealt much more with the current Drupal release, as well as with version-neutral topics.
Read on for more on the following topics:
- Drupal deployment strategies
- The Chaos tools for Drupal module development
- Drupal in Education
- Searching with Apache Solr
- Recent MySQL happenings
DrupalCon 2010 Trip Report – Day 0
Here is an overview and some notes from the Drupal Scalability and Performance Workshop I attended before the start of the DrupalCon conference that Ian and I are attending in San Francisco. As the title suggests, this workshop was focused on making Drupal (and web-applications in general) run fast. Really fast. I hope to apply the techniques learned in this workshop over the next weeks and months to make our sites run fast enough to handle any traffic load that might be thrown at them, even were an event to occur that would send major public traffic to our sites.
Read on if you are interested in the performance and scalability of Drupal, MySQL databases, and web applications in general.
DrupalCon 2010 Trip Report Day 1
Hello from San Francisco! I was waylaid in Chicago and missed the morning presentations, but I wanted to share what I’ve learned so far at DrupalCon. First, a quick bullet point summary for those who don’t want to dive into the details:
- Drupal now powers over 1% of the total websites, closely tied with Joomla. WordPress powers about 8.5%.
- Drupal 7’s forms will allow us to add conditional form fields that appear for the user without requiring a postback to the server. See the (very relevent for us) example here: http://d7.drupalexamples.info/form_example/states
- Drupal 7’s User Experience (UX) team has made improvements to the interface that on our site is called the “Edit Console”. You can read more about their project at their website: http://www.d7ux.org/content/
- We can improve our site performance by moving functionality out of the template files and into theme functions. Basically, the way we currently do things, we have to read a file off the server’s disk every time anyone loads anything on the site. By using theme functions instead of template functions we avoid this disk read and dramatically improve performance.
- You can watch many of today’s presentations at http://sf2010.drupal.org/conference/schedule for free! Many of those without video have their slides up. The presentations from Monday are at the bottom of the page since, at the time I’m posting this, they’ve already happened and aren’t as interesting to the conference attendees.
- Monster Menus, the module the Amherst developed that lets you add sub-pages and manage permissions is a few weeks away from being refactored to eliminate any Amherst-dependent code. The version we’re currently running assumes that Amherst’s version of Banner exists, which we’ve had to work around. The new version will make this easy for us and open MM up for other schools to use.